1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a terminal device, an image processing system, and a computer program product.
2. Description of the Related Art
In these years, portable terminals are widely used as information processing devices, each of which includes a touch panel and a wireless communication unit, and is configured to be easily portable. Such portable terminals include, for example, multifunction telephone terminals (smartphones) having a telephone function and tablet computers mainly used for information processing. Hereinafter, such portable terminals are called smart devices. The smart devices use, as a way of wireless communication, near field communication using an integrated circuit (IC) tag or a wireless local area network (LAN) that enables communication at a higher speed and over a longer distance than the near field communication.
Meanwhile, as one type of image visualization devices having a function of visualizing image data, multifunction printers (MFPs) have heretofore been known that implement a plurality of functions, such as a printer function, a scanner function, a copy function, and a facsimile (fax) function, in one housing. In order to use the functions of an MFP from a smart device, techniques are known that connect the MFP to the smart device by combining the near field communication with the wireless LAN.
For example, the smart device first uses the near field communication to acquire, from the MFP, connection information for establishing a network connection thereto via the wireless LAN. The smart device then establishes a communication with the MFP via the wireless LAN based on the connection information acquired from the MFP, and communicates setting information and print information with the MFP via the network using the wireless LAN.
Japanese Patent Application Laid-open No. 2013-214806 discloses an MFP that includes a near field communication (NFC) tag and a wireless transmitter-receiver for communicating with a mobile phone; the MFP sends, to the mobile phone, information indicating a type of image processing accepted to be selected when the communication with the mobile phone has started to be established, and performs the image processing based on execution instruction information sent from the mobile phone according to the information indicating the type of image processing. According to Japanese Patent Application Laid-open No. 2013-214806, when a user uses a function of the MFP from the smart device (mobile phone), the user can save the trouble of setting again the function and setting values selected on the MFP side on the smart device, so that ease of operation for the user is improved.
In some cases, items settable as setting values for a function to be used vary among different models of MFPs. In those cases, the conventional smart devices perform various settings for an MFP after the network connection via the wireless LAN is established by exchanging the connection information of the network with the MFP using the near field communication, as described above. As a result, if the establishment of the network takes a long time, the user needs to wait until the function of the MFP can begin to be used, thus causing a problem in convenience.
Japanese Patent Application Laid-open No. 2013-214806 does not disclose a method for easily setting the items settable as setting values for a function to be used by MFPs from the mobile phone of the user when the items differ among the MFPs. Thus, Japanese Patent Application Laid-open No. 2013-214806 fails to resolve the problem in the convenience occurring when MFPs are used from a smart device (mobile phone).
Therefore, there is a need to improve the convenience in using an image visualization device from a smart device.